


We're In Ruins—We're Too Broken

by Kabby_Griffin-Woods (SilverShortyyy)



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, trigger warning for anything just in case
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-08-24
Packaged: 2018-07-27 06:18:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7606981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverShortyyy/pseuds/Kabby_Griffin-Woods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six months left to live. Six months to save the world. Six months to find a way out. Six months. Six months. Six months. Update: five months and two weeks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Clarke. “ALIE told me the nuclear power plants left in the world are burning, and that we have six months until another nuclear apocalypse that reaches even off to space.”_

_Bellamy. “How are you sure she isn’t lying?”_

_Jaha. “Because ALIE uploaded herself onto the Ark’s remaining systems; she could see the Earth from there.”_

_Abby. “Thelonious is right. ALIE probably analyzed whatever she could see from Earth for the amount of time she was at the Ark.”_

_Bellamy. “With all due respect, how do we know that wasn’t false information?”_

_Marcus. “Because ALIE doesn’t lie to anyone who’s already been in the City of Light. She doesn’t give out false information to those she knows can be helpful to her. Just incomplete information sometimes.”_

_Abby. “And ‘sometimes’ is more like ‘very close to never’.”_

The world is ending in six months. Scratch that: five months and two weeks. 

The countdown is the most distinguishable feature in the Chancellor’s room, where Marcus and Abby have spent most of their time in when Clarke, Raven, and Bellamy weren’t there instead. The numbers and letters are written prominently on the clear board with red ink, sharp, visible, impossible to ignore. 

The world is ending in five months, two weeks, and one day. That is, if ALIE’s calculations are more or less exact and if nothing goes wrong to speed up the process. ALIE did say they had _about_ six months, so they could give or take a week, but that didn’t change their problem. 

Forget about their problems in Arkadia and in Polis. Those are already a heavy load on all of them. But they still have to worry about preventing another nuclear apocalypse by putting out the fires in the nuclear power plants all over the world, not even mentioning they didn’t know where to start. So they should search. But they’ve been searching for the entire week and have covered nearly all the lands that stretch between Arkadia, the Ice Nation, the Trikru village, Polis, and TonDC. In the afternoon they’ll get the report if anyone found anything. 

But Raven already calculated for it yesterday. They have less than a five percent chance to find anything, especially because nuclear power plants are known to be gigantic and prominent, something that’s yet for them to come across. 

No one admits it, but they’re getting tired. It’s one monumental problem after the other; they’ve gone from trying to survive to trying to save the world. They aren’t superheroes, they aren’t gods. They’re just people who’re trying to make the most of what they’ve got. 

Raven sleeps the most soundly at night. At least that’s what they all think. She doesn’t scream in the middle of the night, doesn’t end up knocking on anyone’s door, doesn’t end up not sleeping at all, because she just sleeps. But her dreams are plagued with what she had caused, what she let happen, because if she never took the chip in the first place, Abby would have never taken it and Arkadia wouldn’t have gotten taken over. _But if you never took the chip, you would never know how to defeat ALIE._ It would have never gotten that big of a problem in the first place. 

Sometimes, she wakes up to the thought of everyone dying at her hands, their blood covering her flesh like a second skin, sticking to her clothes like a permanent stain. 

Bellamy rarely slept, and everyone only pretends not to notice. Everyone thinks it’s because Octavia ran away, never to be seen again, but Clarke and the others know it’s more than that. Bellamy has to live with all he’s done, and that includes the slaughter of the Grounder army, and Lincoln’s death at Pike’s hands, and Pike’s death at Octavia’s hands, and to be honest he doesn’t blame Octavia for running away. He would run from himself too, if he just could. 

He spends his nights patrolling, sometimes taking a drive in the rover with Miller and Bryan to keep him company (or Jasper and Monty if they wanted to for the night), and when he sleeps, it’s usually just a short nap on a bench somewhere in the daytime. 

Marcus and Abby never really ended up separating after they got back from Polis. They shared quarters and Marcus would never leave Alpha Station without Abby. Abby never let him out of her sight, and even when their fingers weren’t intertwined, the backs of their hands would brush, or their arms would be so close together, or Abby’s hand would be wrapped around Marcus’s fingers while he squeezes her small hand in his larger one. 

They work together, they eat together, they sleep together. And the times when Abby’s screams permeate the Station’s walls, it would always be accompanied by both their footsteps a few minutes later, leading out to the steps where they stare out at the stars for the rest of the night. 

Clarke bears the worst. No one could make a real list of why. It’s just that she would wake up every night, either crying or screaming or shouting or all of the above, and every night the nightmares would change. It could be Mount Weather all over again, or losing Lexa. It could be a realistic dream where everyone’s happy that breaks her too much when she wakes up and remembers reality, or it could be Abby never waking up from the shock of the EMP. It could be Raven’s blood on her hands, or a dream where they never stop ALIE. It could be too good, or just a little bad, but she never woke up okay. She was always crying, always broken, always a little torn apart. And yet, when she shows her face, it’s like she didn’t wake up feeling empty inside, feeling like she’s turned into a hollow shell of who she used to be. Abby asks her a lot if she’s okay. Clarke replies she’s fine every single time. Marcus tries to talk to her sometimes, but Clarke never gives him a straight answer. Even Octavia, the rare times she sneaks in to get some supplies, tries to get Clarke to say something—anything—but Clarke doesn’t break a bit. 

Clarke never got used to all the nightmares and all the too-good-to-be-true dreams, but all it takes is to remember the fight is not over for her to pick all the pieces up for another day, and to come out her room like nothing ever happened. 

As they all do: they come out of their rooms like nothing ever happened, like none of it is real, like this is just another day on Earth and they were always on Earth and the Ark was just a distant dream. In a way, it was. In some weird way, it _is_. And they have to face the reality that there is no more coming back home, not when home already died, not when home isn’t a place anymore. Not when home is too broken and too destroyed. 

The world is ending in five months, two weeks, and a day. They’ve all put up a strong front and they’ve all pretended they don’t cry in their sleep, like they don’t know Clarke never wakes up a day without crying herself to waking up, or that Raven’s just trying to look strong for everyone who’s falling apart. They all pretend they don’t know Bellamy hasn’t been sleeping or that he knows Octavia comes and goes sometimes, that when they bring up Octavia coming back he just sinks back and has that look of fear not because of her but for her, from himself. They pretend they don’t all hear Abby’s screams when she wakes up in the middle of the night, or Marcus’ cries in the forest when he thinks no one can hear him anymore. They pretend not to notice how broken Octavia looks when she asks about her brother and all she gets in response is ‘he’s not around’ even when he is. They pretend not to know that Bellamy doesn’t even want to see Octavia anymore, that he doesn’t want anyone to come near him, that he sees himself as a monster. They pretend they’re all okay and fixed and ready for the next battle, but they all know they aren’t. They all know no one is fixed and everyone’s broken and Arkadia is littered by the pieces they can never put back. 

And still, the five of them stand in the Chancellor’s room, pretending Raven’s eyes don’t look empty or that Marcus is leaning too much on Abby, or that Abby can’t look at Clarke without spacing out and nearly making herself cry all over again, or that Clarke can’t look at anyone except Bellamy who can’t even look at her. 

For the first week, it was okay. It was so easy to pretend. But sometimes, it gets a little too much, a little bit more every time. 

Bellamy’s radio sparks to life, and he holds it up to his ear. 

“Blake. Yes. Okay. Run through check, one last time.” He turns off the radio, and they pretend his voice doesn’t sound so dead even if it’s such a far cry from the Bellamy Blake that helped Clarke win against ALIE. 

They all know what he says, but even Raven doesn’t say it first. The air’s so dead, so devastated, so broken, and the walls of pretend just continue crumbling when Bellamy says it. 

“Nothing.” Clarke looks down and clears her throat, Abby looks at Marcus and Marcus looks at the board, and Bellamy looks somewhere while they all try and think of something: a next move, a Plan B, a _something_ because their something is nothing. 

Raven, though, would usually make up another plan, her eyes lighting up just a bit. Just a tiny bit, enough to let the old Raven Reyes shine through, enough to let them see she’s still in there, and her brain is still working wonders and her gears are still turning to figure out a solution. Today, though, she just stood there without so much as a spark in her eyes with her shoulders sunken and her eyes dead. 

A tear comes too fast and slides down Raven’s cheek. She doesn’t feel it until it’s already plopped down on the floor. 

“I can’t do this anymore.” She’s shaking her head, she’s closing her eyes, and the tears keep coming. She’s not stopping it, she’s falling apart, and Raven Reyes doesn’t fall apart, not like this, not ever. “I can’t pretend it’s all fine when it’s not.” She can, she always has, it’s always been like that. What changed, what made her so different? “I can’t pretend I’m a superhero and I can save the world.” How did she get so _broken_?

“Raven,-“ 

“Abby, would you just look at us?!” The tears are flowing, the tears are falling. And for some reason, she can’t bring herself to care. Not now, not anymore. “I can’t even fix up an old screen to so much as show the color red and Bellamy isn’t sleeping. Clarke comes out of her room always looking too fine, too neat, too _perfect_ , and you and Marcus are always awake too early and asleep too late. Monty and Jasper are always somewhere, coming back smiling but with God knows how many bottles of moonshine finished and stashed away empty. We’re all keeping secrets everyone already knows and _we’re trying to save the world by putting out nuclear flames all over the goddamn world_ , and we haven’t even found a single damn power plant.” 

They all try to open their mouth. They all try to protest. They all try to say something to turn the situation around. 

But Raven’s right: they’re all too damn broken and still they try to save the world. 

“Look at us: we’re in ruins, we’re in pain, we’re all too damn broken to try do the impossible and save the world. And I’d keep doing it if I can but I just can’t anymore. I _can’t_.” And Raven waits, and waits, and waits. But no one says a word, not like they should, not like they would’ve. “I’d rather fix myself and see my friends fix themselves and die than get even more broken and be so dead inside that living isn’t worth a shot anymore. 

“And besides, we’re too broken to save the world. Everyone’s too broken and just pretending they’re not.” 

The tears keep flowing, the tears keep falling, but Raven never leaves, Raven never walks out, just stands there in that room with them no matter how long it became. Clarke is the first to leave, then Bellamy. Then Raven wipes her tears off and she goes out the door followed by Abby and Marcus, and from then on, they never set foot in the Chancellor’s room again, and no one questioned it. Monty and Jasper stopped running off to what everyone found out to be the Dropship, and they came back with fifty empty bottles of moonshine that they began bringing in the day after they came back to Arkadia. 

Months passed and things got better, at least because there was less pretending and less secrets, more living in the moment even if Raven’s eyes look dead and Bellamy’s eye bags become too dark, or if Clarke comes with red eyes and tear-stained cheeks or Abby pale and shuddering and Marcus like her stoic faced shadow. Octavia eventually came back and Indra visited more often, and five months passed without a single word of their impending doom. 

One day, the countdown on the clear board of the Chancellor’s room was a week left. One more week, but no one woke up that night after there was a big, big boom. 

And everything, was a bright white light since. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All errors are mine. Enjoy!

When the light fades, the world is covered in a thick layer of smog: white, shadowy, heavy smog. Beyond the smog is what once was trees and greenery, what used to be glistening green leaves under the warm sun and dark brown bark in the warm shadows. Now, the leaves are gone and charred so that they are black ash at the feet of the trees, on the soil that had been mud but is now gravel as dry as the mud had been wet. The branches that are able to stay pointing up had flames at its ends, as if it were a wick and the tree a candle.

The grass is gone—there isn’t even evidence that grass existed. It’s like when Clarke had burned the three hundred Grounders back in the Dropship days, when they’re brown soil turned to ash. There isn’t anything left to prove that anything had been green, or anything not black or gray or white. Everything was burned to dust, and some still burning though ever gently.

Deep in the forest—or what’s left of it—is a clearing much clearer now than it was before. It once was hidden by high-standing trees and surrounded by a fence of wood and palm leaves, and maybe a bit of iron here and there, and in the center was a pile of wood and rocks.

Where their hearth once stood, there is a soft flame puffing out white smoke into the skies.

Around the hearth were tents, tents of varying sizes and colors and designs. Designs mostly because some could have just been draped, some actual tents, and some put up with hardwork and sweat. Upon entry, the most eye-catching structure was the gigantic metal contraption with red drapes for curtains. The Dropship was what they called it—what they have always called it, even before they knew it as a kind of home.

Where there had been tents of different kinds of fabric, there is now framework slowly crumbling apart, and where there had been curtains of entry there is now ash. What the red drapes had been there is now nothing, because it had been burned in the explosion and only the ends attached to the Dropship door were left, small sparks turning it bit by bit into ash.

And, where the Dropship once stood, broken walls now stand. Some walls still stood proud, some shattered. Most bits of the metal were burned, lying around somewhere while the engine let out black smoke from under the main floor. Sparks randomly popped where the wires had been, and it would take everything not to imagine Clarke Griffin by the wire box while Raven sat on the upper floor telling Clarke what to do.

_“I’d choose you.”_

And she did. All the time.

The ceiling had been blown off, or maybe burned, no one knows. Even the ashes that had been there before Mount Weather were burned; there is no evidence of anything left, only a few bits and pieces and ruins of a life from an unknown past.

The paths are clearer now though, literally etched onto the ground as if a wheel of fire burned through and marked the roads that had been walked on. So from the Dropship, even with all the rubble, it’s so easy to navigate to the new home, to what _was_ the new home, to formerly Camp Jaha and formerly Alpha Station, to what was formerly and lastly known as Arkadia but will forever be known as just another landmark.

Just another bulk of metal that was probably a home.

The sign is charred. Only the first letter remained intact, though hard to read while it is covered in grime and ash and maybe residual sparks from an earlier flame. The gates are open, as they became when the blast pushed them apart, blew them off their hinges and blasted them to the other side of the compound. The fence is a little torn, the more superficial layers of metal peeling off and burning to charred bits to the ground, and the walls of the buildings are falling apart and crumbling to the burned ground.

Charred metal. Burned soil. Crumbling structures.

And in the halls, in the rooms, in the deep corners of Alpha Station, there is the Flame around Clarke’s neck and Raven’s support by her bedside, Octavia’s weapons and Bellamy’s weapons side by side on his table, Jake’s ring around Marcus’ finger, and Abby’s ring around her finger, Jasper’s goggles dropped to the floor, and Monty’s laptop miraculously only partially charred in his desk drawer.

Burned cotton blankets and broken walls.

But most of all, they’re burned bodies and blackened bones.

Clarke’s fingers that are now only bones wrap around the Flame dangling from her neck, locking it in a cage of bones. She’s facing away from the door, curled into herself, as if she had been crying—and maybe she was and maybe she had been—while looking up to the window that looks up to the stars: there where her home had been, when the problems were minuscule, and where everything used to be.

Raven’s bones are set on her bed like a corpse would be in a casket: her hands clasped one over the other on her belly, head looking straight to the ceiling and legs straight with no slight bend. Her support burns gently beside her, lighting up her room in a ghostly way, and settling around her neck (or what’s left if it) and on her chest (or what charred bone was left of it) was the iron origami necklace Finn had given to her. It’s like she had given up when it happened, just looking up at her ceiling wondering how everything went wrong.

Octavia’s bones and Bellamy’s bones lie intertwined, as if they were hugging when it happened. And maybe they were, since Octavia had snuck in at night and found her way to Bellamy’s bed, snuggling into him as if she was a little girl again with her big brother as her only solace. Bellamy’s hands are cradling Octavia’s head, while Octavia’s hands are curled between their chests, and it’s like Bellamy had been thinking about all the things he had done wrong to her and wishing he could turn back time. Their weapons lay on an organized heap on Bellamy’s bedside table, two swords and two guns sitting side by side, the gunpowder had exploded already and set fire to some of the items in the room, but Bellamy and Octavia’s corpses lay untouched from blast.

On their bed, Marcus spoons Abby with their fingers intertwined, his right over her right over his left over her right. Their bones are locked in an eternal embrace, unbreakable even by death and Armageddon. Contrast to burned skin and cloth and charred bones, their rings shine indefinitely, as if a light beholds them in the thick smog, both rings on the ring finger of either person. Marcus has it around his right ring finger, while Abby has it around her left ring finger. Marcus’ chin lays softly on Abby’s shoulder, puzzle pieces fitting together as if they have always been meant for each other, and maybe they are, no one will ever know.

Jasper’s bones are splayed out as he was when it happened. His goggles hang from his fingers by the strap that hung around his neck, dangling at the edge of the bed like stringed lights. One would think by his position he was sleeping soundly when it happened, even when in fact his eyes were glued to something on the ceiling just thinking, spaced out, staring at nothing as invisible tears drew lines down his face. The glass of his goggles are fogged up and stained with grime, and his bottom drawer had blown open somehow to reveal one last bottle of moonshine.

Monty hadn’t even been in his room when it happened. He was walking over to Jasper’s room only to stop by the door and lie beside it. So his bones lie leaning on the wall beside Jasper’s door, legs splayed out over the corridor. Monty’s head tilts up, looking to a random spot on the ceiling while he thought about everything, from life on the Ark to Bellamy and Clarke fighting when they first came on the ground. From trying to survive to saving people. From saving people to killing people to sacrifices to murder. From just being a normal eighteen or something year old space kid to becoming a hero who had killed his mother twice. Suddenly, he didn’t even know how old he was. And it happened while his laptop blinked its last battery in his desk drawer, and he was engulfed by the light and all that was left of him was giving up.

Beyond Arkadia, there are more corpses, more bones, more bodies set to radioactive flames. As ALIE had predicted, life even in space can’t be sustainable, and the bits of the Ark left slowly crumbled back to Earth. It’ll take maybe a year for it to drop, but for now, it falls apart piece by piece, every bit becoming a part of the Earth’s atmosphere while the inhabitants softly burned.

Billowing smoke. Smog. Gentle, soft, sickly sweet flames.

A piece of paper flies through the wasteland, zipping through smog and smoke alike. When it finally lands, the paper can be seen to clearly read a definition.

_Arcadia (noun): a very pleasant and quiet place or scene_

Where the paper is, the place is deathly quiet, and the scent of death reeks all around. It is not anywhere near sweet nor pleasant, and yet its name is Arkadia, and it should’ve been home and might’ve been home, but maybe home burned down the moment they counted down to the end.

The paper rests on a red leather seat behind red drape-curtains and iron-steel walls. The seat quietly burns, a seatbelt hanging haphazardly by it. There a girl had been sitting, and that was the beginning, when everything seemed so complicated, when the pod was launched and a woman prayed her daughter would be fine, and now everything’s fine, maybe; because there’s no way else to say it, because this might just be better than fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the super late update guys! Also, I won't be posting for another lengthy undetermined time so, yeah. Thanks for reading! Y'all are awesome!
> 
> Edit: As I find myself unable to continue this, I'm ending it at two chapters. The lengthy undetermined time turns out to not have an expiration date, sadly. But yes.


End file.
